Thursday, June 29, 2017

After some fifteen years,
we may be witnessing a revival in the debate between the Aryan Invasion Theory
(OIT) and the Out-of-India Theory (OIT). The AIT camp has been completely
stonewalling any attempt at debate from the OIT camp for years now, though in
the late 1990s some of its tenors did briefly try to refute the pro-OIT
arguments then doing the rounds on the brand-new internet forums. But it went
into smug hibernation, having decided that on second thought, the whole OIT was
too flaky and too politically tainted (even more than the colonialist-cum-Nazi-tainted
AIT) to dirty its hands on. Meanwhile, save for a handful of busy bees, the OIT
camp was equally smug, deluding itself that it had disproven the AIT long ago.

Now however, one Tony
Joseph, veteran business journalist, gate-crashes into the Aryan origins debate
via an article in The Hindu: “How
genetics is settling the Aryan migration debate” (16 June 2017) This in turn is
an interpretation of the impact of a scientific paper by Marina Silva et al.: “A genetic chronology for the Indian Subcontinent points to
heavily sex-biased dispersals” (Evolutionary
Biology BMC, March, 2017; the team was led by Prof. Martin Richards). Joseph claims that the AIT was put in doubt by
earlier genetic studies but that this paper and other recent findings have
firmly decided the debate in favour of an invasion. (Well, he uses the weasel
word “migration”, like most AIT champions who lack the courage of their
conviction; but like most “migrationists”, he turns out to mean not a migration
of families in wagons, but an entry of all-male bands of warriors who end up
fathering plenty of children upon native women; a scenario ordinarily known as
an “invasion”.)

The Aryan invasion question is correctly formulated
as: “Did IE language speakers, who called themselves Aryans, stream into India
some time in 2000-1500 BC?” Joseph’s triumphal answer is: “Genetic research based on an avalanche of new DNA
evidence is making scientists around the world converge on an unambiguous
answer: yes, they did.”

As a reader of internet
media, much lambasted by the mainstream media, I am aware of the genetic
studies in recent years that were welcomed as disproving the AIT. I was
sceptical: the initial generation of genetic studies had to be taken with a big
pinch of salt because it suffered of childhood diseases. More fundamentally, genes,
much like archaeological findings, don’t speak. You cannot tell from genes, nor
from excavated artefacts, what language the people concerned spoke. I frowned
when I saw genetic findings being mustered as proof against the linguistic AIT.

Confusing language
movements with demographic movements was a childhood disease of Indo-European
linguistics before 1945. Especially after Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), race thinking came to dominate the
Humanities. There were warnings from Indo-Europeanists, including the
much-maligned Friedrich Max Müller, to maintain the distinction, but the public
and many professionals started speaking of “the Aryan race”, not in the vague
sense common earlier (race = any group of hereditary belonging, from family to
nation and race to humanity, Sanskrit jāti),
but in the biological sense. After 1945, this went completely out of fashion in
the West, but in India, not encumbered with the guilt about Nazi racism, time
has stood still.

That is why Joseph can
assert that a genetic study has disproven a linguistic theory. Strictly
speaking, that alone should stamp him incompetent for the Aryan debate. Then
again, let us face the fact that among Indians, this confusion is also quite
common, as it was among Europeans of an earlier generation. In principle this
makes sense: you continue both the genes and the language inherited from your
parents. But while your genes can’t be traded in for others, people do change
language in the course of their lives, not as a rule but as a sufficiently
frequent exception. Before the colonial age, which imparted European languages
to a number of colonial populations, white Europe and brown India represented about
a half each of the Indo-European-speaking population, thus vividly
demonstrating that their language had crossed a racial frontier: either brown
to white or white to brown. So, genes and language are different thing, partly
related and partly not.

For an invasion as dramatic
and rich in consequences as the Aryan influx is deemed to be, with a complete
switch in language and culture of a highly civilized and densely populated
country, it is nonetheless unlikely that it would leave no traces at all. In
those days, there were no internet courses that allowed you to learn a language
spoken at a great distance; for imparting a language to foreigners, it was
necessary to go to their country. There must have been some kind of sizeable
migration demonstrable in the archaeological and genetic record. In this
respect, archaeology is completely disappointing the AIT party, for it
consistently refuses to throw up any trace of this fabled Aryan invasion. But
they have their hopes up anew: perhaps the genetic record can fill in the
blanks?

Given that pattern of
expectation, studies refuting the invasion theory, for whatever they were
worth, were very welcome. They dampened the usual arrogance of the AIT camp,--
at least to the extent that people heard of them. The dominant media largely
kept the lid on them. If they reported them, it was in measured, or what Joseph
calls “nuanced”, tones; nothing like the triumphalism with which he himself claims
that genetics has proven the AIT.

Now that at least one scientific paper has been
presented as supporting the AIT, the reaction among activist Hindus was
initially one of unpleasant surprise, sometimes panic, for many of them had
always harboured a secret fear: “What if the scholars do manage to prove the
AIT?” But this was followed by a resolve among some of them to revisit the
evidence and get serious about the debate again.

Other activist Hindus, by contrast, feel vindicated in
their long-standing support for the AIT. Indeed, there exists a casteist-racist
fringe among Brahmins who feel flattered by the claim that they descend from
foreign conquerors and that they imposed the caste system as a racial Apartheid
system. Outsiders including Joseph may not know about this, but any defence of
the AIT plays into the hand of the most regressive elements of Hindu society.
In the West too, the AIT is not only an unassailable orthodoxy in academe, it
also serves as ideological backbone for some remaining racist ideologues.

Apart from those fringes, the healthy reaction among
more sober Hindu activists is the resolve that they, or at least those among them
who are equipped for it, should return to the Aryan debate and win it once and
for all. This promises to be an interesting cup final, for the opposing camp is
self-assured and in no mind to give in.

How
does a language invade?

The origin of the Indo-European languages in India,
starring Sanskrit, is principally a linguistic scenario, which must have come
about on the waves of historical developments, and these may have left traces
in the genetic record. Joseph is neither a linguist nor a historian nor even a
geneticist, and in my quarter-century in the thick of the Aryan debate, I have
never encountered his name. That need not be an obstacle, for by their own
effort, people can become self-taught experts in a specialism in which they
have no degree, even after a career in a different field, including business
journalism. But they still have to satisfy the same criteria as the certified
scholars or scientists whose equal they aspire to be. This, then, is what is
missing in this article. Joseph doesn’t have a grasp of some basic issues in
this debate.

This is not so exceptional. Many geneticists
themselves don’t properly understand the Aryan debate, already two centuries
old before genetics became a useful instrument in reconstructing migrations in
history. The first studies in this field, finding e.g. that some genes were
strikingly common between North India and Eastern Europe, contained conclusions
that were at best not in conflict with the Aryan invasion scenario but did not
prove it at all. In casu, they may at
that stage have shown up grounds for either an India-to-Europe movement or a
Europe-to-India movement without being able to decide between the two. Yet,
they concluded in favour of the AIT because they retrofitted their own newfound
data into the theory that, they heard, had already been proven by the
linguists.

This is the so-called “circular argument of authority”:
first you feed an expert a story, then he himself comes out with that same
story, and then you can claim that your own little story has been confirmed by
a world expert, thus giving it more authority. For example, when Indian
“secularists” invoke the positions of Western India-watchers (about Kashmir,
the supposedly secular Constitution, Hindutva etc.), the latter invariably turn
out to have first swallowed the biases of their Indian “secularist” sources. So
the Indian secularists are really only quoting themselves, though embellished
with the academic jargon that Western graduates are so good at.

In the Aryan debate, the same thing has happened: the
AIT viewpoint is first fed to experts from other fields, such as genetics, and
then these view the data in their own field through the glasses which their
partisan friends have put on their noses. The geneticists quoted here, both in
their original papers and in the quotes from interviews, clearly have no
independent grasp of the Aryan debate.

Thus, the quoted paper by Silva et al. states: “Indo-European
has been frequently connected to the so-called ‘Indo-Aryan invasion’ from Central
Asia ca. 3,5 ka, and the establishment of the caste system.” There never
follows a critical second thought about this received wisdom. Not having
studied this debate, they fall back on hearsay from their Orientalist
colleagues, who all teach the AIT. What other influence would they have? Those
capable of situating and defending the OIT can literally be counted on your
fingers; none of them has functioned as an information source for geneticists.
Though the geneticists certainly live up to the scientific method when it comes
to handling genetic data; when they approach the AIT as possible explanation,
they become mere followers of convention.

Nevertheless, we should not use this circumstance as
an escape clause from the debate. For meanwhile, Joseph does report on a
development among geneticists that may well prove as important as he asserts.

Invaders

Joseph claims he is part of a bold dislodging of an
established orthodoxy: “The dominant
narrative in recent years has been that genetics research had thoroughly disproved
the Aryan migration theory.”

Oh yes? Where are the
schools and institutes that teach the demise of the AIT? The truth is that
these studies never made a dent in the pro-AIT orthodoxy. The mainstream media
chose to talk about them only minimally, the textbooks never mention them at
all. The only people excited about these findings were the OIT adherents, and
if you listened in on them, you might have gottenthe impression that the time was ripe
for the acceptance of the OIT.

What has suddenly happened, according to
Joseph, is this: “Until recently, only data on mtDNA (or matrilineal DNA,
transmitted only from mother to daughter) were available and that seemed to
suggest there was little external infusion into the Indian gene pool over the
last 12,500 years or so. New Y-DNA data has turned that conclusion upside down,
with strong evidence of external infusion of genes into the Indian male lineage
during the period in question.”

In itself, it is no big deal that Joseph misinterprets the “mt” as
“matrilineal” instead of “mitochondrial”, but again it suggests he is
unfamiliar with his chosen topic. In journalism you often have to deal with unfamiliar
subjects, but relative to the tall claims he makes in this article, he ought to
have done his homework better. Nonetheless, he whets our curiosity for his
evidence on the Y-chromosome data.

“The reason for the difference
in mtDNA and Y-DNA data is obvious in hindsight: there was strong sex bias in
Bronze Age migrations. In other words, those who migrated were predominantly
male and, therefore, those gene flows do not really show up in the mtDNA data.
On the other hand, they do show up in the Y-DNA data: specifically, about 17.5%
of Indian male lineage has been found to belong to haplogroup R1a (haplogroups
identify a single line of descent), which is today spread across Central Asia,
Europe and South Asia. Pontic-Caspian Steppe is seen as the region from where
R1a spread both west and east, splitting into different sub-branches along the
way.”

Note the AIT-serving claim,
appearing out of the blue, that the Pontic-Caspian steppe “is seen as” the
region of origin. This expression is a sure give-away of hearsay, of a borrowed
opinion. It is not based on the geneticists’ R1a research.

Frankly, I had understood that
the jury is still out concerning the origin of R1A, and that it is strikingly
in evidence among some “aboriginal” Indian tribes. But not being a geneticist,
I will not argue too forcefully about that. At any rate, the paper by Silva et
al. does not say that it found earlier studies to have been mistaken about
this, and is altogether more nuanced and temperate than the tall and abrasive
claims by Joseph.

In that paper, “16 scientists
led by Prof. Martin P. Richards of the University of Huddersfield, U.K.,
concluded: ‘Genetic influx from Central Asia in the Bronze Age was strongly
male-driven, consistent with the patriarchal, patrilocal and patrilineal social
structure attributed to the inferred pastoralist early Indo-European society.
This was part of a much wider process of Indo-European expansion, with an
ultimate source in the Pontic-Caspian region, which carried closely related
Y-chromosome lineages… across a vast swathe of Eurasia between 5,000 and 3,500
years ago’.”

That is something else
altogether. Their evidence concerning an origin in “the Pontic-Caspian region”
will have to be studied, of course. But note that the scientists admit that
they have not studied the link between their genetic data and the
identification of the purported migrants as Indo-European: this is only
“attributed” and “inferred”, meaning “borrowed on trust from our
Indo-Europeanist informers”, all of them wedded to the AIT. They do not make a
professional claim for the AIT, that is only a speculative afterthought, merely
for genetically attested movements.

“In an email exchange”, of
which doesn’t tell us the leading questions, “Prof. Richards said the prevalence
of R1a in India was ‘very powerful evidence for a substantial Bronze Age
migration from central Asia that most likely brought Indo-European speakers to
India’.”

Their identification as
Indo-European is, in his mouth, not more than hearsay, by definition not
corroborated by genetic data, nor by the archaeological data, which show up no
such dramatic discontinuity, as even AIT partisans admit. “Bronze Age” is also
but a vague name for a long and ill-defined period. But we retain that, if
rendered correctly, he does insist on a real influx from Central Asia still
showing up in 17,5% of the Indian Y-chromosomes.

Central-Asian invaders in Hindu historiography

If this claim proves correct,
there are a number of other explanations. An influx from Central Asia is
roundly admitted by Indian tradition. Shakas, Kushanas and Hunas came in the
historical period, just before and just after the time of Christ. Long before
that, since the onset of the Ice Age, many northerners escaped the barren north
and migrated south, hence e.g. the many blondes described by the Egyptians
among their western neighbours; India too must have been among their
destinations. And between those chronological extremes, there must have been
more.

Though their incursion was
considered dramatic at the time, with Vikramaditya of Ujjain hailed by Indians as
the defeater of the Shaka invaders, it remained inconsequential culturally, as
these invaders dissolved in the Indian population and assimilated the language
and religion of their hosts. Only their genes remained, till recently in
hiding, but now accessible. Today they must form part of those 17.5%.

A
second consideration is that an inflow does not prevent a movement in the other
direction. If the Silva paper is sensational, it might be because of passages
like this one, about the Bronze Age: “Gene flow at this time was clearly bi-directional,
as seen in the expansion west of lineages M5a2a4, U2c1b + 146 and
M3a1b + 13105. This is reflected in the genome-wide ADMIXTURE analysis (…),
where the autochthonous South Asian component (…) appears at low levels in
Iran.”

For
readers of The Hindu (please note,
foreigners, that this name is a historical relic, and that since decades it is
a left-wing anti-Hindu paper), it may come as a surprise that a paper claimed
to prove the AIT actually documents a bit of OIT. Others will be less surprised
by this confirmation of the emigrations from India, in line with extant
archaeological findings and with the general drift of earlier genetic
studies,-- which Joseph’s article was meant to counter.

Another possibility,
tailor-made for the Hindu reader, is a compromise. Come to think of it, it is
surprising that none of those synthesis-enamoured Gandhians raised this possibility
before: a scenario that approximately satisfies both the AIT and the OIT camps.
Here, there was an influx from Central Asia, which with the help of linguistics
we could pinpoint to ca. 4000 BC, the farthest estimate of the fragmentation of
Proto-Indo-European. Only, this influx did not bring Indo-Aryan, the
exclusively Indian branch of Indo-European (distinct from other branches such
as Greek, Celtic, Slavic etc., that “remained” in the west), as the AIT holds,
but all of the branches, still united in their foremother, Proto-Indo-European.

As Shrikant Talageri has shown,
Hindu tradition envisages all of “Aryan” history as the life and times of the
descendents of Manu, the founder-king who landed with his Flood-survival ship in
Manali and set up his court in Ayodhya. A descendent of his was Yayati, whose
sons Druhyu and Anu must have been the ancestors of the non-Indian branches of Indo-European,
destined to leave India in the pre-Vedic period c.q. in the middle Vedic
period. Greek ambassadors after Alexander reported a Hindu tradition that Manu
had come into India from the west. Like their estimate that Manu was crowned in
precisely -6776, this may be a garbled reconstruction of hazy traditions; but
for what it is worth, it might correspond to the alleged genetic findings of an
early influx. After all, though India may be the cradle of all branches of
Indo-European (exactly the OIT), nothing has been claimed about where the
Proto-Indo-Europeans originate. It could be outside India, all while leaving
the OIT untouched.

As
even Silva et al. acknowledge, “genetic data have provided no clear evidence
for the ‘Indo-Aryan invasions’ so far, and their very existence is challenged
by many archaeologists.” Tony Joseph has a long way to
go before the AIT can be accepted as proven.

Globalization

In spite of the foregoing, let
us appreciate why got Joseph so enthused about recent developments in
genetics: “The robust conclusions of Professor Richards and his team rest on
their own substantive research as well as a vast trove of new data and findings
that have become available in recent years, through the work of genetic
scientists around the world.”

That is not true for the
identification as Indo-European, which would at best be plausible, but
otherwise I acknowledge Richards must be a pioneering scientist in a
fast-progressing research field. The argument of authority implied in “around
the world” is also exaggerated, for the really pioneering genetic research is
confined to a few countries. China has recently joined the front group, and
India is catching up, but if you see exotic names among the authors, they are
mostly at American or European universities; witness all the Portuguese names
under the quoted research paper produced in the UK. But this much is true:
whereas the Indo-European origins question holds a certain fascination for
people of European descent, the new research yields very similar new insights
in the demographic history of other cultures.

Thus: “(…) many studies
mentioned in this piece are global in scale, both in terms of the questions
they address and in terms of the sampling and research methodology. For
example, the Poznik study [David Poznik,
cfr. infra] that arrived at 4,000-4,500 years ago as the dating for the
splintering of the R1a Z93 lineage, looked at major Y-DNA expansions not just
in India, but in four other continental populations. In the Americas, the study
proved the expansion of haplogrop Q1a-M3 around 15,000 years ago, which fits in
with the generally accepted time for the initial colonisation of the continent.
So the pieces that are falling in place are not merely in India, but all across
the globe. The more the global migration picture gets filled in, the more
difficult it will be to overturn the consensus that is forming on how the world
got populated.”

About that, we can only rejoice
and join Joseph in his enthusiasm. And we may at once point out that a vaguely
similar though more gradual development is taking place in the highly relevant
field of linguistics, with the increasing sérieux
of the once-flaky subdiscipline of megacomparatism. So far, Indo-European
studies including the Aryan origins debate focused on what happened after
Proto-Indo-European, once the fragmentation had set in. But now we can look
beyond that, and explain the long-existing suspicions of a kinship with Semitic,
or the newly-realized kinship with Dravidian. This too is a heady evolution,
though encumbered by the 19th-century impression of bookishness when
genetics has all the glitter of futuristic science.

R1a

More controversial is another
big name he invokes: “Peter Underhill, scientist at the Department of Genetics
at the Stanford University School of Medicine, is one of those at the centre of
the action. Three years ago, a team of 32 scientists he led published a massive
study mapping the distribution and linkages of R1a. It used a panel of 16,244
male subjects from 126 populations across Eurasia. Dr. Underhill’s research
found that R1a had two sub-haplogroups, one found primarily in Europe and the
other confined to Central and South Asia. Ninety-six per cent of the R1a
samples in Europe belonged to sub-haplogroup Z282, while 98.4% of the Central
and South Asian R1a lineages belonged to sub-haplogroup Z93. The two groups
diverged from each other only about 5,800 years ago.”

Note that 5,800 years ago is
about the time estimated by legitimate experts in linguistics for the initial
fragmentation of Proto-Indo-European. It could for instance be the time when an
Indo-European-speaking population left its Indian homeland.

“Dr. Underhill’s research
showed that within the Z93 that is predominant in India, there is a further
splintering into multiple branches. The paper found this ‘star-like branching’
indicative of rapid growth and dispersal. So if you want to know the
approximate period when Indo-European language speakers came and rapidly spread
across India, you need to discover the date when Z93 splintered into its own
various subgroups or lineages.”

From these data about Z93, it
does not follow that “Indo-European
language speakers came” to India. Here you see a vivid illustration of how the
interpretative framework in terms of an Aryan invasion is merely borrowed on
trust from people whose bias the geneticists don’t even realize.

Nonetheless, Joseph takes this
as a sufficiently strong launching-pad for an unwarranted jump: “This clear
picture of the distribution of R1a has finally put paid to an earlier
hypothesis that this haplogroup perhaps originated in India and then spread
outwards.”

This is not the expert
speaking. Note indeed that in spite of Joseph wanting Dr. Underhill to say
that, and no doubt trying to make him say it, the professor is not quoted as
saying it. All that the quoted text says, is that these genes have a common origin,
and that they split up when spread over sizable distances. The OIT has no
quarrel with that. Then, he adds the AIT as possibly explaining his findings,
but that part is not his expertise as a geneticist speaking. His findings are
just as compatible with the OIT, but that is just not part of his mental
horizon.

According to Joseph: “This
hypothesis was based on the erroneous assumption that R1a lineages in India had
huge diversity compared to other regions, which could be indicative of its
origin here. As Prof. Richards puts it, ‘the idea that R1a is very diverse in
India, which was largely based on fuzzy microsatellite data, has been laid to
rest’ thanks to the arrival of large numbers of genomic Y-chromosome data.”

But even with the data now
claimed, R1a is still more diverse in India than in Central Asia and Europe. If
the former is therefore incapable of being the homeland, so are the latter.
Nonetheless, our AIT activist goes full steam ahead:

“Now that we know that there
WAS indeed a significant inflow of genes from Central Asia into India in the
Bronze Age, can we get a better fix on the timing, especially the splintering
of Z93 into its own sub-lineages? Yes, we can; the research paper that answers
this question was published just last year, in April 2016, titled: ‘Punctuated
bursts in human male demography inferred from 1,244 worldwide Y-chromosome
sequences.’ This paper, which looked at major expansions of Y-DNA haplogroups
within five continental populations, was lead-authored by David Poznik of the
Stanford University, with Dr. Underhill as one of the 42 co-authors. The study
found ‘the most striking expansions within Z93 occurring approximately 4,000 to
4,500 years ago’.”

Here we see no link with an
immigration, perfectly unnecessary for a genetic differentiation. And if there
was one, it apparently took place 4,500 years ago, still a thousand years
before the established Aryan invasion scenario.

But at least we note with
satisfaction that Joseph has belatedly accepted that nothing points to the
once-orthodox scenario of the Aryan plunderers ruining the Harappan
civilization: “This is remarkable, because roughly 4,000 years ago is when the
Indus Valley civilization began falling apart. (There is no evidence so far,
archaeologically or otherwise, to suggest that one caused the other; it is
quite possible that the two events happened to coincide.)”

Then, Joseph makes another
jump: “The avalanche of new data has been so overwhelming that many scientists
who were either sceptical or neutral about significant Bronze Age migrations
into India have changed their opinions. Dr. Underhill himself is one of them.”

If true, such conversion among
experts would count as prized secondary evidence. Thus, leading archaeology
professor BB Lal’s and Sanskrit professor Nicholas Kazanas’ conversion from AIT
to OIT have been functioning as serious arguments of authority, especially in
the absence of such conversions in the opposite direction. But let us look more
closely:

“In a 2010 paper, for example,
he had written that there was evidence ‘against substantial patrilineal gene
flow from East Europe to Asia, including to India’ in the last five or six
millennia. Today, Dr. Underhill says there is no comparison between the kind of
data available in 2010 and now. ‘Then, it was like looking into a darkened room
from the outside through a keyhole with a little torch in hand; you could see
some corners but not all, and not the whole picture. With whole genome sequencing,
we can now see nearly the entire room, in clearer light.’”

Impressive progress, yet that
does not make Underhill find genes moving into India. Though certainly trying
hard, Joseph has not managed to extract a statement from Underhill that his earlier
research was wrong.

Joseph is very good at making
the most of what comes under his hand, and of shading over nuanced expert
findings into his own blatantly partisan narrative. However, our interest is not
in finding fault with Joseph; indeed we thank him for drawing our attention to
this new scientific development. Our interest is in what genetics really has to
say on the Aryan origins question.

North-South divide

Joseph claims another convert
from OIT to AIT: “David Reich, geneticist and professor in the Department of
Genetics at the Harvard Medical School, is another one, even though he was very
cautious in his older papers. The best example is a study lead-authored by
Reich in 2009, titled ‘Reconstructing Indian Population History’ and published
in Nature. This study used the theoretical construct of ‘Ancestral
North Indians’ (ANI) and ‘Ancestral South Indians’ (ASI) to discover the
genetic substructure of the Indian population. The study proved that ANI are ‘genetically
close to Middle Easterners, Central Asians, and Europeans’, while the ASI were
unique to India. The study also proved that most groups in India today can be
approximated as a mixture of these two populations, (…)”

Westerners will only be mildly excited
by this, but in India, the racial interpretation of the linguistic division
between Indo-Aryans and Dravidians is so vividly kept alive by Dravidianists,
Ambedkarites and their missionary shepherds, that others there will heave a
sigh of relief at news of the “admixture” between the two populations.

In the same vein, Indian
patriots rejoiced that the study found “the ANI ancestry higher in
traditionally upper caste and Indo-European speakers”.

Well of course: speakers of
Indo-Aryans live predominantly in the north, so they have a higher incidence of
northern genes. As for the higher castes, it doesn’t take any invasion scenario
to understand that they must be more from the north, as per the written Hindu
tradition. Especially in Tamil Nadu, hotbed of Dravidianism, this is striking,
with Bania castes originating in Rajasthan and Gujarat, and Brahmins imported
from the north by kings who wanted to endow their dynasties with Vedic
prestige. So obviously, in Dravidian areas, upper castes will stand out by
their more northern genes. But only gradually, for even here there is an
“admixture”.

Hence this comment quoted from
a prominent Indian researcher involved in this study, geneticist Lalji Singh:
“But at some point in time, the ancient north and the ancient south mixed,
giving birth to a different set of population. (…) This paper rewrites history
(…) there is no north-south divide”! A newspaper headline made it even more
sensational: “Aryan-Dravidian divide a myth: Study”.

(The linguistic state of the art on this is that
Dravidian is related to Elamite in Southwestern Iran, a reasonable theory
insufficiently verified but largely based on trust in the very few scholars who
have investigated these data. An anti-India bias predictably deduces from this
that Dravidian must have come from Elam, not the other way around. And then,
after having entered India and developed in Gujarat, Dravidian expanded to the
south, where a more primitive native population adopted the language. To the
dismay of Dravidian chauvinists and separatists, this means that Dravidian is
not native to South India, but that it is native to India. The political unit
they ought to be defending is not “Dravidasthan”, but India. Moreover, Dravidian
is related to Indo-European on a par with Uralic, Semitic et al., descending
from a common grandmother-language some 15,000 years ago, “Nostratic”, as
distinct from more distant languages like Munda, Tibetan, Andamanese etc.)

ANI and populations to the west

Joseph’s misunderstanding of
the whole Aryan issue is again clear from this claim: “By itself, the study
didn’t disprove the arrival of Indo-European language speakers; if anything, it
suggested the opposite, by pointing to the genetic linkage of ANI to Central
Asians.”

That North-Indians and
Central-Asians are related, as the genetic linkage between them implies, is
true in any serious scenario, certainly also in the OIT. Being closer to
Central Asia, it is perfectly normal for the ANI to have more in common with it
than the ASI. The only narrative that throws up a problem here is not the OIT,
with speakers of Indo-Europeans streaming out of India into Central Asia and
thence into Europe, but a purely reactive alternative to the AIT, viz. the non-migration scenario. When Europeans
first thought up the AIT around 1820 (after having espoused the OIT for half a
century) and then took it to India, many Indians simply denied that anyone had
come from anywhere, and pointed out correctly that nothing amounting to what is
known as the Aryan invasion (with the importation of Sanskrit from outside) is
described in scripture.

No, but the Rg-Veda and the
Puranas do describe a hoary emigration
from India, viz. of the Druhyu and Anu tribes. Therefore, knowledgeable Indians
have adopted the OIT, which necessitates commonalities between India, Central
Asia and Europe as much as the AIT does.

But I have no doubt that
Joseph’s dialogue partners in Aryan origins discussions included many who saw
no need to explain the linguistic commonalities between Indo-Aryan and the
languages further west, and simply settled for the static and unimaginative
non-migration narrative. Those people reject the very concept of an
Indo-European language: to them, Greek, Germanic and other European languages
are not related to Sanskrit, and so there is no need for any migration either
way to explain how they came to be in their present habitat. If at all you confront
them with similarities, they make bold that these are just loanwords.

This is part of a larger
problem, that explains why the OIT has made no headway at all in terms of
international acceptance. Most Indians don’t have their heart in the OIT, a non-Indian
term launched by the American Hare Krishna follower Dr. Edwin Bryant ca. 1996.
In describing the Aryan debate, he took ample account of a vocal Indian
vanguard that understands the basics of the Indo-European question, viz. that one
language straddles the Hindu Kush, and that therefore half its speakers must
have crossed this border either in eastern or in western direction (AIT c.q.
OIT). But far more weighty and numerous in India are those who merely want to
be left alone, who don’t want to be bothered with the AIT and all its
concomitant politics (colonialist, Nazi, Dravidianist, Dalit). They simply have
no specific theory about the non-Indian Indo-Europeans: these are simply not
within their mental horizon, which stops at the Khyber Pass. The question whether
they migrated, and whether they really speak a cognate language, is simply of
no interest to these AIT-rejecting laymen.

Western participants in the
debate may have debated some OIT sophisticates from a distance, but they have
also interacted with Indian-born colleagues from, say, the Medical or Engineering
Department of their university, who are bright but have never studied the Aryan
question. These far more representative Indians often have strong opinions
about the “breaking India” implications of an Aryan invasion but not the
necessary knowledge to argue this point, often even rejecting the whole notion
of an Indo-European family. They are “under-informed but over-opinionated”.
Meeting such people makes Western Indo-Europeanists sceptical of any Indian
contribution to this debate, and by extension of any pro-OIT contribution even
by Western colleagues. Both Sanskrit professor Nicholas Kazanas (Athens) and
myself have many anecdotes up our sleeves of how any Homeland debate in which
the OIT figures, is being stonewalled by AIT-leaning linguists.

Genetics and linguistics

Now, Tony Joseph is going to
teach us reason: “However, this theoretical structure was stretched beyond
reason and was used to argue that these two groups came to India tens of
thousands of years ago, long before the migration of Indo-European language
speakers that is supposed to have happened only about 4,000 to 3,500 years ago.”

For that, no “stretch beyond
reason” is necessary, for the two phenomena, the genetic division in ANI and
ASI and the linguistic division in Indo-European, Dravidian and others, are
unrelated. Even if the ANI people came from outside, any “reasonable” scenario
has them mingle with natives and take in lots of their genetic heritage, rather
than commit genocide on them and replace them wholesale with a different
genetic type. Then again, this genocide does exist, viz. as part of the
Dravidianist mythology, especially in its missionary version, because of
overcompensation for the real genocide of natives in the Americas that
accompanied their Christianization.

If I have understood anything
of these genetic discussions, it is that chronological estimations of genetic
events are possible (much as in historical linguistics, though this
“glottochronology” is in fact highly controversial). Apparently, the split of
the Indian people in a northern ANI and a southern ASI dates a lot deeper into
the past than the fragmentation of Indo-European and than the “Bronze Age
migration” discussed in Silva et al.’s paper, and need not even result from a
migration, as Joseph had assumed. And if there was a migration at all, it may
not have been the Aryan invasion, or may have nothing to do (causally nor
chronologically) with the division of Indo-European.

The concepts of ANI and ASI were
developed by geneticists untrained in linguistics and never visibly bothering
about a coordination between their own data and those of historical linguistics.
So, it is not so scandalous if the two sets of data are greatly at variance.

Conspiracy by association

In some reactions, Tony Joseph
has been attacked on account of the company he keeps. Look whom he quotes: “In
his column for Discover magazine, geneticist Razib Khan said this
about the media coverage of the study: ‘But in the quotes in the media the
other authors (other than Reich that is -- TJ) seem to be leading you to
totally different conclusions from this. Instead of leaning toward ANI being
proto-Indo-European, they deny that it is.”

Contentswise, we have a repeat
of Joseph’s just-discussed mistakes: (1) he identifies the genesis of ANI with
an immigration, as if such genetic development could not originate in a vast
area like the subcontinent; and (2) he identifies this unsubstantiated
migration with the supposed Indo-European migration. But the interesting thing
here is not what Khan says, but who he is.

It is rumoured, in some
reactions below Joseph’s article as well as elsewhere, that Khan is a
right-winger, has published on the “race-realist” website Vdare (after Virginia Dare, the first white person born on American
soil), and has been sacked as a columnist by the New York Times. This is “guilt by association”: Joseph’s position
is blackened by association with the company he keeps, and Khan’s position on Indian
genetics is blackened by association with his writing outlets. This type of
gossip is very popular among illiterates who lack the habit of serious debate
on issues, and of seasoned debaters who realize that in a given case, no
argument ad rem will succeed, and who
therefore resort to an argument ad
hominem.

A quotation that deserves
repetition in almost every debate on the Aryan question, and many other debates
besides, is: “Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small
minds discuss people.” It is often flatteringly ascribed to Eleanore Roosevelt
but is traceable farther back, at least to Theology professor Samuel Miller in
1827. It contains part of the reason why AIT skepticism has made no headway.

A few of us have tried to
present the arguments for the OIT, but our discourse was drowned out by the
shouting and cackling of numerous vocal Hindus against famous upholders of the
AIT: “The British concocted the AIT
as part of their divide-and-rule policy!”, “William Jones was a colonial
agent!”, “Friedrich Max Müller was a missionary agent!”, “Michael Witzel is a
professor of Harvard, started as a theology school!” This has greatly put off
serious scholars who didn’t know better than the AIT and would have given a
fair hearing to the OIT if it had not been associated with this miserable conspiracy
discourse (as well as with Hindu Nationalism).

Not that their camp is much
better. There too we have “guilt by association” thinking. AIT pamphlets often
contain phrases like: “The OIT is defended by people like PN Oak, NS Rajaram,
Koenraad Elst…” (This, incidentally, is untrue: the late PN Oak deduced
everything everywhere from India or Hinduism, with no special role for
Indo-European, and NS Rajaram rejected the AIT but equally pooh-poohed the OIT
and any other concern about any non-Indians, including the claim that they came
from India.) This is mere juxtaposition, but in the real world it functions as
association and achieves the target of putting all the people mentioned outside
of polite society.

All these associators on the
anti-AIT side can shout all they want, because they only speak to their own
side, never interact with the AIT camp and never suffer any (healthily
correcting) consequences. The consequences are for us, who live in the real
world and interact with real opponents. I have been disinvited at several conferences (and no doubt silently excluded from speaking there at many more) because, though my abstract was judged interesting enough, someone up there was briefed about my views and associations, and intervened to my detriment.

Another aspect of the
backbiting against Razib Khan concerns its relevance. Those who cite the
incriminating opinions about him, should tell us what difference such
contemporary facts make to the truth or otherwise of the AIT, which pertains to
events that took place thousands of years ago. It is irrelevant
chronologically. At least if your goal is not to win an ongoing debate with
Joseph by making him look bad, but to disprove the AIT. I guess small minds
don’t aim that high.

It is also irrelevant
logically. The truth of a proposition is independent of its formulator’s record
or character. Surely you can find writing-pads from Adolf Hitler’s childhood in
which the devil himself writes: “1 + 1 = 2”. Does this suddenly become untrue
just because an unsavoury character agreed with it?

As an extra, I would like to
learn whether the purported boycot of this alleged brown racist is a policy
that our AITdisbelievers advocate.
Attempts to shut down debate and impose left-wing control are as much a problem
in Berkeley as in Jawaharlal Nehru University. The people who call this Khan a “right-winger”
are the same who attack Hindus with the same allegation. Hinduism is deemed a
racist religion, with Brahmin Aryan invaders oppressing the native Dalits and
Dravidians. American liberals, in this case strange bedfellows with the
Evangelists, consider the struggle against caste and untouchability and against
its justifying ideology, Hinduism, as a noble and necessary struggle, a new
frontline now that slavery has been abolished elsewhere.

So, this Razib Khan may have
unsavoury opinions or associations, and he may be downright wrong about the
AIT, but he is entitled to having his comments on a genetics debate discussed
in an Indian left-wing paper. To that extent, he deserves our support.

Symmetrical migration

Let us return to genetics and
quote Joseph again: “Let’s (…) ask what Reich says now, when so much new data
have become available? In an interview with Edge in February last year, while
talking about the thesis that Indo-European languages originated in the Steppes
and then spread to both Europe and South Asia, he said: “The genetics is
tending to support the Steppe hypothesis because in the last year, we have
identified a very strong pattern that this ancient North Eurasian ancestry that
you see in Europe today, we now know when it arrived in Europe. It arrived 4500
years ago from the East from the Steppe...”

Yes, there was an Aryan
invasion, but it was not the one usually meant. In Central Europe in the -3rd
millennium, the material culture changed drastically. In some areas, the
population was entirely replaced by newcomers, in others too the percentage of
newcomers was sizeable. By culture and physical type (now mapped and understood
more precisely thanks to genetics), they were the same people later identified
as Celts, Germans, Romans. There, in Europe, we really have an invasion of
Aryans moving in from the east. And now that we know what a real Aryan invasion
looks like, we note that it is completely missing in India.

Speaking of which: “About
India, he said: ‘In India, you can see, for example, that there is this
profound population mixture event that happens between 2000 to 4000 years ago.
It corresponds to the time of the composition of the Rigveda, the oldest Hindu
religious text, one of the oldest pieces of literature in the world, which
describes a mixed society...’ In essence, according to Reich, in broadly the
same time frame, we see Indo-European language speakers spreading out both to
Europe and to South Asia, causing major population upheavals.”

Note that Reich doesn’t
describe an invasion, at least not in the passage Joseph chooses to quote here.
He describes an admixture of different populations, something that can easily
be imagined as internal to a large territory such as India, not needing foreign
immigrations. Instead, it could have to do with the migrations triggered by the
dessiccation of the Saraswati basin, for instance. It is only Joseph himself
who interprets Reich’s statement as “in essence” a matter of Aryan invasions.

Also note that Joseph has “the Indo-European
language speakers” spread from the steppes to “both Europe and South Asia”.
While this is not impossible, it rarely happens. Migrations are mostly very
asymmetrical because the reasons why humans migrate are rarely symmetrical.

Thus, the Bantu languages were
carried forward by the Neolithic innovation, agriculture, and ended up being
dominant in half of Africa, all starting from somewhere in sub-Saharan
West-Africa. Why did they only expand in a southeastern direction, and not
north? Because you cannot practise agriculture in the desert.

Similarly, Austronesian has
spread south from Southeast China, not north, because to their north was a
numerous and well-ordered society that would assimilate any immigrants;
southwards, they could find a niche in Malaysia and Indonesia, and virgin
territory in islands from Madagascar to New Zealand and Hawaii. For the same
reason, Russian could expand eastwards all the way to Alaska, but not
westwards. In the case of Arabic, no such reason can immediately be identified (Iran
could just as well have been arabicized as Egypt), yet fact remains: Arabic
spread from Arabia westwards all the way to Morocco, and not eastwards at all.

Also, the steppe does not
support large populations, whereas India was a demographic heavyweight, then
already. It is not impossible for (all-male) bands of steppe warriors to
conquer centres of civilization, but leaving a lasting imprint is rarer. The
Huns invaded China, India and Europe and did not leave their language anywhere;
in fact, we are not even sure which it was (Attila was a Gothic nickname; after
much research, the dominant estimate now is that they spoke Chuvash, a para-Turkic
language marginally surviving in Russia). The Mongols invaded Central and
Western Asia, Eastern Europe, and China, yet except for marginal Kalmukkia,
they did not leave their language anywhere. And such invaders should have
completely changed the linguistic and cultural landscape of mighty India?

Parting
shot

The final paragraph is merely an exercise in slamming
open doors. Or so it seems, for several in-your-face assertions are built into
this innocuous piece of journalistic emptiness:

“What is abundantly clear is that we are a multi-source
civilization, not a single-source one, drawing its cultural impulses, its
tradition and practices from a variety of lineages and migration histories.”

This is a phrase absolutely no one will disagree with;
though it conceals the more pressing question how weighty the different
contributions are, and the false implication that these are all equal. Yet, it
is here for a reason, part of The Hindu’s
editorial line: it is meant as a punch in the face of the Hindu Nationalists,
who stress unity. Not racial unity, as is here falsely intimated, but still
some kind of pan-Indian sense of national unity, translating today in e.g. the
conviction that Kashmir belongs with India. Therefore, among secularists, it is
always welcomed if an anti-unity statement of any kind is smuggled in.

“The Out of Africa immigrants, the pioneering, fearless
explorers who discovered this land originally and settled in it and whose
lineages still form the bedrock of our population”.

That “bedrock of the population” phrase may not be so
innocent, as it is probably meant to exclude the Brahmins and thus forms part
of the dominant anti-Brahmin discourse. But it is not said in so many words, so
let that pass. Anyway, Joseph already refrains from saying that Indian
indigenousness is confined to the tribals (some 8%), whom the missionaries ca.
1930 have started flattering as Adivasis, a pseudo-traditional Sanskrit coinage
meaning “aboriginals”, like the Amerindians in America.

Nevertheless, against the “Aryan invaders”, he still
tries to affirm their superiority by calling their entry from Africa more than
50,000 years ago “fearless”. Exchanging lion territory for tiger territory must
indeed be courageous and certainly “pioneering”, but peopling an empty land is
not braver than invading a human habitat. The Aryan invaders may never have
existed, but if you do postulate them, as Joseph does, you have to at least
credit them with the bravery required for defeating a vastly more numerous
native population. If you care to look at the details, his bias is showing.

“[T]hose who arrived later with a package of farming
techniques and built the Indus Valley civilization whose cultural ideas and
practices perhaps enrich much of our traditions today”.

Here we get the bulwark part of the secularist view of
ancient India: the Harappan population spoke a different language than the Northwest-Indian
population today, mostly taken to be Dravidian; and their civilizational
innovations starting with agriculture had been borrowed from abroad, viz. from
West Asia. This latter point is important to stress, as Hindu Nationalists
might get the pretentious idea that some inventions had been done in India and
even by Indians; Allah forbid!

But at least Joseph recognizes that the Harappans, deemed
non-Aryans, “arrived” from somewhere else. We are talking of what was then the
largest demographic concentration on earth, so it is hard to imagine how they
all came from the surrounding mountains and deserts. Nevertheless, the core of
truth here is that Dravidian, deemed to have been the language of Harappa,
arrived from somewhere. The aboriginality of Dravidian, which Dravidian
chauvinists take for granted as a logical counterpoint to Aryan foreignness,
deserves questioning.

“[T]hose who arrived from East Asia, probably bringing
with them the practice of rice cultivation and all that goes with it”.

The Mundas, tribals whose language must have been spoken
all around the Bay of Bengal, speak an Austro-Asiatic language related to
Vietnamese. However, the jury is still out on whether their homeland (as well
as the homeland of rice cultivation) was in India or in Southeast Asia.

“[T]hose who came later with a language called Sanskrit
and its associated beliefs and practices and reshaped our society in
fundamental ways”.

This phrase, affirming the foreign origin of Sanskrit
through the Aryan Invasion Theory, is the raison
d’être for this whole paragraph. Tony Joseph may not be a geneticist, nor a
historian or linguist, but having been editor of the Business Standard, he is a first-class journalist. The occupational
hazard of this vocation is that you have to talk about any topic that may come
under your hands, often very much outside your area of expertise; such is the
case in this article about the genetic evidence for an Aryan invasion. But a
strength of this professional group is their mastery of simple rhetorical
devices. Case in point: writing a conciliatory final paragraph full of empty
phrases amounting to an all-together-now chumminess, and yet, inside it, burying
a dagger aimed at your usual target: “Aryans”, Brahmins, Hindus.

“[A]nd those who came even later for trade or for
conquest and chose to stay, all have mingled and contributed to this
civilization we call Indian.”

Though not the topic of the article, this phrase is
nevertheless highly welcome to drive home the usual concern of any secularist
paper: affirming that Muslims and Christians are equally entitled to whatever
India has to offer. Note however that in crucial respects, unlike earlier
immigrants such as Shakas and Hunas, who have dissolved their identities in the
ambient population and culture, Muslims and Christians have not “mingled”.

“We are all migrants.”

What an enlightened phrase, meant to reassure his
secularist friends of his own virtue and to exercise moral pressure on
status-conscious Hindus that they should shed this backward attachment to the
nationalism-infested Indian homeland theory. Yet, do you think that all the
anti-Hindu and anti-Brahmin activists who now go around triumphantly quoting
Joseph’s article, intend to say: “We too, we are but migrants, as much as the
invading Aryans”?

Conclusion

By now, Tony Joseph may wish he had never written this
piece. He presents a blatantly partisan interpretation of a recent research
paper in a field he visibly doesn’t master. At least he could have had it
proofread by a legitimate geneticist. His bias pertains to the Aryan origins
question, and that too he hasn’t thought through.

Then again, I understand that he felt the normal
journalistic urge to let the world know about a new development that he
considered very important. For a definitive account, you do not go to
journalists, their role is not that of experts, merely of messengers:
“Something is happening over there; now go see for yourself what is really is.”
At the present state of the art in genetics, however, developments are not as
dramatic as he seems to have thought.

Nonetheless, we had better look into them. The
geneticists he has quoted here may not be the publicity-seeking types who like
to make bold statements. Nonetheless, their belief in an all-male incursion
into India that has left traces in the Y-genes may well have substantial
ramifications for Indian history, even by implying an Aryan invasion. And while
none of them has been quoted as actually having proven, through his research,
an Indo-European invasion, it is still possible that some of them do think so.
Or, because of the present commotion over Joseph’s article, they may step back
to make up their minds, now with a better grasp of the Aryan origins question,
and finally conclude that what they have proven, does imply the Aryan invasion.
It will take argumentative acumen and a serious research effort to convince
them otherwise.

Hindus have long acted as if it is enough to convince
yourself in order to be entitled to declaring yourself as winner of the debate.
In fact, it is necessary to convince others before you can rest on your
laurels. Therefore, we must thank Joseph for spurring us into more and better
research. After two centuries, let’s get this invasion nuisance over and done
with.

10 comments:

These politically biased pseudo-scientific theories involving a guessing game from genetics, which is highly inherently speculative due to trying to use the genetics of modern people in a land which has seen countless invasions over millennia, are laughably trite to say the least. The word desperate comes to mind as well. This is because those few people outside of Hindu true believers who care about any of this are far outnumbered by the Hindu true believers, and they know it.

Therefore they try to stack the deck in their favor whenever they can more and more as time goes by and less and less people on the AIT side still exist or care. What keeps them going is for the most part money. The few remaining politically motivated fanatics who are trying to change the prevailing winds are given money with hopes of their being able to convince with their pseudo-scientific theories the right ears within the "bona fide" educational systems in order to pressure the AIT to be taught at the least at the university level as unquestionably true and any theory opposing it as politically biased fantasy meant to help push neofascist agendas in India.

Where is that money coming from? My guess is it comes from politically motivated types who would like to undermine as much as possible the Hindu support of anything resembling Hindu leadership of India by undermining Hinduism. I don't mean necessarily non-Hindus who fear some sort of actual neofascist Hindu government, but more likely simply the political opposition who depend on riling up that fear in the moneyed elite of whatever persuasion. But the handwriting it on the wall regardless of their fading dreams of reducing the impact of Hindu beliefs, and as that knowledge sets in there will be less and less heard from them. Especially since the real science is not and has never been on their side.

Hindu society can certainly be proud of the great depth to which its spiritual indic culture pervades its minds and has happily resided their for centuries in spite of so many foreign invasions and constant mutilation by the influx of a militarily superior monstor. Now we can proudly claim that we are not a society which gives up all its delicate yet comprehensive ancient thought process, well integrated in our very breath and forming a rich socio-cultural complex, in lieu of self appointed prophets and their ridiculous revelations.

It was dispersal of population from Western India into Northern, Central, Southern and Eastern India due to drying up of Sarasvati river and desertification of Western India around 2000 BC. Western India, a fertile well watered area which supported a huge population suddenly became incapable of supporting large human population and thus mass movement of populations began WITHIN India.

This was the end of 'Indus' Valley civilization.

I think reason for the higher percentage of Haplogroup R1a among upper castes is not invasion from Central Asia, but dispersal of population from Sarasvati basin due to aridity. Since these people were superior to rest of Indians in cultural terms, it stand to reason that new comers from Sarasvati basin would have conquered and dominated the new lands and intermarried into the local elites.

We know for certain that Ganga-Yamuna Doab was the easternmost limit of Harappan civilization and so they knew this area well indeed. And further more, since Ganga-Yamuna Basin is the adjacent to what was once Sarasvati Valley, it stands to logic that a migrant from Sarasvati Valley would opt for an area more familiar to him rather than Peninsular India which is more distant and unfamiliar. This should explain why R1a Haplogroup is more prevalent in North India than in Peninsular India.

Now some physical anthropology facts:-

Reality is that genetics have not come up with anything that physical anthropology has not discovered. Speaking in terms of physical anthropology, Indian population is a mix of Caucasoid and Australoid physical types - corresponding to Ancestral North Indian and Ancestral South Indian of genetic studies. Caucasoid type is subdivided into Mediterranean and Alpine Races - former coming from West Asia and latter from Central Asia. Well, genetics also agree that a population did come from West Asia and another from Central Asia (though admit that Central Asian origin is disputed in genetics). But these migrations which shaped what is now Indian population took place after 7000 BC and before 5000 BC - much before the so called Aryan Invasion Theory, splitting up of Proto-Indo European into many languages and composition of Vedas.

Genetic studies are really moving at incredible pace and are people are taking positions based on genetic studies.

May I request you to kindly look at this post ( where this post is also linked) and maybe post a new blog about your thoughts.http://eurogenes.blogspot.co.ke/2017/07/the-out-of-india-theory-oit-challenge.html?m=1

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Dr. Elst, I was recently reading early history of Russia. And it is said that Russian state was formed by Scandinavian invaders called Varangian "Rus" and that name "Russia" was derived from them.

I find this eerily similar to Aryan Invasion Theory. I personally find arguments against this theory more convincing and it seems that Varangian Invasion Theory and Aryan Invasion Theory have the same agenda to prove that two great cultures are not built by the natives but by outsiders. I would like to know your view on the subject.

About Me

Koenraad Elst (°Leuven 1959) distinguished himself early on as eager to learn and to dissent. After a few hippie years he studied at the KU Leuven, obtaining MA degrees in Sinology, Indology and Philosophy. After a research stay at Benares Hindu University he did original fieldwork for a doctorate on Hindu nationalism, which he obtained magna cum laude in 1998.
As an independent researcher he earned laurels and ostracism with his findings on hot items like Islam, multiculturalism and the secular state, the roots of Indo-European, the Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute and Mahatma Gandhi's legacy. He also published on the interface of religion and politics, correlative cosmologies, the dark side of Buddhism, the reinvention of Hinduism, technical points of Indian and Chinese philosophies, various language policy issues, Maoism, the renewed relevance of Confucius in conservatism, the increasing Asian stamp on integrating world civilization, direct democracy, the defence of threatened freedoms, and the Belgian question. Regarding religion, he combines human sympathy with substantive skepticism.